Monday, 30 June 2014

It’s all part of the increasingly delusional myth Democrats tell themselves that they are the tribunes of the middle class. In fact, their party is a strange two-headed beast — picture a Cerberus featuring the faces of Barbra Streisand and Lois Lerner.

The Dems are a coalition of ultra-rich cultural-elite donors on the one hand and government employees and their clients on the other. In 2012, President Obama carried those earning under $50,000 by a wide margin. But Romney easily bested him among those over that threshold.

Ever wonder why the Democrats seem to want to keep people poor?

But there’s another reason Democrats can’t talk about their wealth. It’s because they can’t say, “I made it big. Follow me and you can, too.”

Democrats earn their money in ways that aren’t available to most Americans. Yet even for Democrats, the Clintons got rich in an exotic way. They accumulated something like $100 million not by building a business or inventing something or even writing some hit songs. Their entire fortune came from political celebrity. (Their daughter has even accumulated $15 million by being the offspring of political celebrities. Or did you think NBC News paid her $600,000 a year because of her obvious broadcasting ability?)

If the Clintons had gotten rich inventing Facebook, that fortune would have spawned many others. But celebrity honoraria don’t work that way.

Fairfax County (VA) is one of the richest counties in the United States. (Run a few trillion through our nation’s capital and some of it gets stuck there.) Rich people need nannies, housekeepers and landscapers. The wealthy aren’t having kids, their employees are. And so:

More than one-third of the 13,424 kindergartners in the county this year qualified for free or reduced-price meals, a federal measure of poverty, and close to 40 percent of the Class of 2026 requires additional English instruction, among the most ever for a Fairfax kindergarten class.

Another factor:

The 2010 documentary “9500 Liberty” highlighted the contentious debate surrounding immigration in Northern Virginia. The film focused on a law enacted in 2008 in Prince William County that allowed police to question a person’s immigration status during routine traffic stops. The strict aspects of the law were rolled back after the county’s chief of police came out against the policy.

School officials said there is evidence that some immigrant families moved to Fairfax after Prince William’s law took effect; the Fairfax school system experienced an increase of 14,000 Hispanic students between 2008 and 2014.

“People were driven out of Prince William by the intolerance shown in that film,” [School Board member Ted] Velkoff said. “In Fairfax, our feeling is we welcome everybody here with open arms. I’m happy to be a magnet for people who want to live in a tolerant society.”

Sunday, 29 June 2014

Dem candidates love to run on “diversity,” but when there’s a critical task to be done—like getting their sorry asses re-elected—they’re more concerned with competence:

Less than 2 percent of the money disbursed by the Democratic Party’s three largest committees went to firms with full or partial minority ownership, according to a new report released Wednesday that suggests a disconnect between the party’s increasingly diverse voter base and its Beltway leadership.

The very last lines of an MSM story about the children’s crusade invading our southern border:

“I’ve talked to border patrol down in McAllen. They’ve seen TB; they’ve seen chicken pox; they’ve seen scabies. And according to Border Patrol, 4 or 5 of their agents have tested positive for those diseases.”

What makes America exceptional? Little things like public health, which relies in part on a universally available clean water system in major cities like Detroit:

It has been six weeks since the city turned off Nicole Hill’s water..

Dirty dishes are piled in the sink of her crowded kitchen, where the yellow-and-green linoleum floor is soiled and sticky. A small garbage can is filled with water from a neighbor, while a bigger one sits outside in the yard, where she hopes it will collect some rain. She’s developed an intricate recycling system of washing the dishes, cleaning the floor and flushing the toilet with the same water.

“It’s frightening, because you think this is something that only happens somewhere like Africa,” said Hill, a single mother who is studying homeland security at a local college. “But now I know what they’re going through — when I get somewhere there’s a water faucet, I drink until my stomach hurts.”

Hill is one of thousands of residents in Detroit who have had their water and sewer services turned off as part of a crackdown on customers who are behind on their bills. In April, the city set a target of cutting service to 3,000 customers a week who were more than $150 behind on their bills. In May, the water department sent out 46,000 warnings and cut off service to 4,531. The city says that cutting off water is the only way to get people to pay their bills as Detroit tries to emerge from bankruptcy — the utility is currently owed $90 million from customers, and nearly half the city’s 300,000 or so accounts are past due.

But cutting off water to people already living in poverty came under criticism last week from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, whose experts said that Detroit was violating international standards by cutting off access to water. “When there is genuine inability to pay, human rights simply forbids disconnections,” Catarina de Albuquerque, the office’s expert on the human right to water and sanitation, said in the communique.

Is Nicole Hill genuinely unable to pay? The picture that accompanies the article suggests she’s not missing any meals and has in the past afforded the services of a tattoo artist. Also, she’s studying at a local college while raising her three children, but there’s no mention of a job. (Via Drudge.)

Saturday, 28 June 2014

That was Miss Delaware’s reaction to being stripped of her crown for being too old by pageant rules. Don’t worry, honey, you may be almost 25, but you still sound as if you’re 14. Like really.

And a special shout out to Eun Kyung Kim, the Today show writer who made sure that quotation, not “My birthdate was written on the contract” or “I deserve to represent my state,” made it to the web article. Way to keep the sisterhood together.

Two top student government leaders at the University of Las Vegas are requesting Hillary Clinton return the “outrageous” $225,000 speaking fee she reportedly will receive for an upcoming speech at the school in October.

In a video circulated by the national Republican Party Friday, Elias Benjelloun, the UNLV student body president, and Daniel Waqar, the student government’s public relations director, slammed the university’s foundation for paying Clinton so much for the event.

Curious how many people voted in the Mississippi Democratic primary, then (illegally) in the GOP runoff? So is Chris McDaniel, because the number may approximate the margin of his alleged defeat. Less curious are the people who run elections in a few counties there. (Via Drudge.)